Lohse Spoke to WGST 80 Course

Andrew Lohse ‘12 made a formal PowerPoint presentation regarding fraternity life at the College on September 24 to Professor Jennifer Fluri’s course WSGT 80, Feminist Theory and Methodology.

Lohse described avenues for changing the nature of fraternities. Among his suggestions for reform:

+ First, the College needs to honestly evaluate the physical, emotional, and psychological health effects of hazing, the molten core of the school’s dysfunctional culture—not solely in its literal form, but how it bleeds outwards into other behaviors such as sexual assault, alcoholism, drug abuse, and a culture of classist entitlement.

+ JYK’s argument that withdrawing recognition of the fraternities would drive hazing practices “underground” was/is fallacious. Perhaps male to male hazing would persist in some form (as it does on sports teams and in musical groups), but dereifying the power of these fraternity spaces is, in the interim, the only way to make them safe.

+ Until, of course, a suitable alternative can be devised. If such an alternative is possible, the only way I’d see it functioning is by making social houses coeducational and highly regulated.

+ Following my membership at SAE, I was also a member of a coeducational undergraduate society at Dartmouth, Panarchy. Men and women respectfully coexist in Panarchy’s space. Though binge drinking and drug abuse occur there, those practices are not driven by a highly organized patriarchal program; they are matters of personal choice. Hazing does not occur in Panarchy.

+ Sexual assault is significantly less prevalent in coeducational spaces.

+ We do not live in a single sex culture. Fraternities stunt the development of the male psyche at a particularly vulnerable age, in some cases completely warping young men’s view of sexuality, power, dominance, and substance abuse.

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